Monday, May 21, 2007

International Day of Direct Action Against Climate Change and the G8

Oh happy day!I haven't heard this kind of lingo in a while: "The 8th of June International Day of Action Against Climate Change and the G8 has been called by the International Rising Tide Network. This is a call for autonomous, decentralized actions appropriate for your town, city, or local area. Use this international day of action to support local struggles against oil refineries, gas pipelines, strip mines and coal-fired power plants. Disrupt the financial backers of the fossil fuel industry. Organise workshops to spread sustainable post-petroleum living skills. Find a weak point in the infrastructure of resource exploitation and throw a literal or symbolic wrench in the works. It’s time to visit your local polluters and give 'em hell!" From RisingTide.org

From reasoninrevolt.net.au: the 70's Australian broadsheet Direct Action.

I've missed PWW's take on local self-determination such as this story from Estonia, "Estonian gov’t desecrates anti-fascist history"--"On April 27, the Estonian government removed a monument honoring the 270,000 Red Army soldiers who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism in Estonia from a central square in Tallinn, the country’s capital, and moved it to a cemetery two miles away."

Time to brush up on the Dialectical Materialism (nobody told you this was going to be easy):

Lenin's elements of dialectics

Lenin made some brief notes outlining three "elements" of logic after reading Hegel's Science of Logic in 1914. They are:

“

1) The determination of the concept out of itself [the thing itself must be considered in its relations and in its development];

2) the contradictory nature of the thing itself (the other of itself), the contradictory forces and tendencies in each phenomenon;

3) the union of analysis and synthesis.

Such apparently are the elements of dialectics.

”

— Lenin, Summary of dialectics

Lenin develops these in a further series of notes, and appears to argue that "the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa" is an example of the unity and opposition of opposites expressed tentatively as "not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other [into its opposite?]."

Even Wikipedia gets a little confused as to what Lenin is saying, whereas Lenin seems to nail Hegel (which ain't always easy).